> From: Henry Rich > Sent: Monday, 9 August 2010 04:17 > > I have not tried to use the beta because of compatibility fears. > > But with the school year about to start, I was thinking maybe the kids > would want to start with the newest stuff, so I downloaded j701abeta > off the site to see if I could get j.exe working and to see what > functions that I use have been decommitted. > > I can't take the first step. I can run jconsole, but that seems to be > a DOS window. The docs say I should use JAL to get j.exe, but I don't > see how to run JAL from jconsole. > > Is there a guide to getting j.exe up in the beta?
I don't think that I can advise you very well because I'm not really clear what it is that you want your kids to be able to achieve using J. Do you want your kids to use J to investigate problems/data, to build GUI apps with J, or to build internet apps with J? Is it about the students exploring an environment and seeing what is possible (student motivated) or do you have a more structured set of learning objectives for the course? The more structured your learning objectives, the more I'd be inclined to stick with J602 for now. J7 and its various front ends show a lot of promise, but are still developing/changing relatively quickly. For some students/courses that might be quite exciting and motivating, but others will find the lack of documentation and guided examples frustrating. AFAIK a j.exe frontend to J7 hasn't been developed yet. I imagine that this could exist as an addon ide/jwd or similar that would be downloadable from JAL. The main work (as I see it) would involve respecifying the current J602 IDE scripts to be an addon and to work with the much smaller J701 base system library. Given that I imagine a jwd front end isn't an absolute requirement to develop/maintain jwd-based applications, the question is whether it is worth the effort. (Others may want to correct or add to my perhaps naive ideas above!) If you just want to use the updated J701 engine, then I suspect that you can copy the j.dll from the betas to a j602 installation and things should work OK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
